skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This presentation saddened me.

The presentation focused on what it perceived as missing features: structs (seriously?), classes, modules, syntactic sugar, macros, etc. But the huge gaping holes in Javascript are not missing features. They are fundamental errors in the language. Things like ==, numbers as strings, eval, incorrect definitions of false, semicolon insertion, and -- heaven help us all -- improper lexical scoping.

Language designers tend to incrementally add junk to languages until they are complex, unweieldy monstrosities like C++ or Java. Rarely do they fix fundamental errors in the language because that would require backward-incompatible changes. So they stick to adding lipstick to the pig. But JavaScript isn't like other languages: its fundamental errors are so glaring, and impact so negatively on the language, that the benefit of jumping to a "JavaScript 2.0" massively outweighs its incompatibility disadvantages. That's why we see languages like CoffeeScript cropping up despite all their downsides, notably debugging.

The class bit particularly made me sad: JavaScript has a perfectly cromulent, even elegant, object model in the form of prototypes. But a variety of syntactic sugar hacks, weird constructor stuff, and general desperation to be a class-based language have sullied what would otherwise be an elegant mechanism. The solution appears to be: move more towards classes! Thus we still have all the language hacks, and two generally incompatible object models to boot. Plus structs!

Somehow after reading this presentation, I was struck with Yoda's admonition: Eich seems to be looking to the future, never his mind on where his language was.
Zynga specializes in social games. FarmVille is rather pointless if you're not interesting in visiting your friends' farms and chatting about each other's cows. WoW, on the other hand, is fun to play even if you're not into idle chitchat.

Now, Minecraft, that's an Aspie's wet dream.
Ask HN: Review my startup (overlay events data layers on charts)
Hi Everyone,

My partners and I recently launched Chartelligence, a Google Chrome extension that helps overlay data layers on top of Google Analytics charts, and we'd like to hear what you have to say about it.

Our base assumption, as we've experienced from our own online businesses, is that business metrics are often influenced by events (both external and internal to the business), which are usually not trackable, and are hard to visualize on charts. In other words, charts often answer the question of "how are my metrics trending", but fail to answer "why does the chart trend like it does", and the answer to the why part is usually an event that triggered a trend change.

So right now our extension overlays events data layers on top of Google Analytics charts, and also on Quantcast charts. And one thing that we see as powerful, is that data layers can be public, and so shared between similar businesses. You can see for example the case study we put on the site, of how the data layer of "Google Panda Updates" can be correlated (or not) to traffic changes on several sites.

This is a first stage of a broader vision we have, of helping any chart consumer answer the basic question of "why does the chart behave the way it does", and we have some ideas of how to take this forward, for example automatic correlation of data layers to chart changes.

We'd love to get some input from our fellow HNers -- What do you think about the idea in general? Do you see yourself using it? Do you have any suggestions or feedback?

Link: http://chartelligence.com
High DPI users may detect something isn't right, since the technique doesn't take into account DPI setting (the fake firefox bar presented to me was much smaller than what I'm used to)
How to work with audio tag in HTML5
This sort of thing happens all the time in business. There are a variety of common solutions, for example borrowing and repaying once prices are back to normal again, throttling demand in other ways, raising prices to the customer, cutting costs in other parts of the business, etc. All of those affect the value to the customer in some way. They managed to find a creative way to limit that effect.

In the end, they are cheap, if you are worried about their methods I'm sure they have competitors who approach things in a more traditional fashion and charge accordingly.
All that the auto dealers are going to do with this effort is draw attention to this cool new car. Sure, they might succeed in banning them in a state or two (which is ridiculous), but in the end any publicity will benefit Tesla and hurt the dealers (disclaimer: I am not a marketing professional).

EDIT: To clarify my vague statement above, I meant "banning" the Tesla display store business model, not banning Tesla altogether. That's a much more unlikely outcome, although I'm sure they would if they could.
Anyone who's ever bought a car knows firsthand how unpleasant it is to deal with traditional car dealers. The price of every vehicle is fully negotiable but the negotiating room is opaque.[1] Key car features and options are bundled in arbitrary packages and priced in ways that make pricing even more opaque. Car salesmen (they're typically men) almost always have a fake smile on their face and come across as smooth-talking, commission-seeking sharks pretending to be one's best friend. Customers who bite the bullet and buy a vehicle nearly always come away feeling like the dealer took advantage of them.

Kudos to Tesla for taking on this cartel.

--

[1] Edmunds lists the following types of fees charged by traditional car dealers at the time of sale: "registration fees," "doc fees," "trade-in fees," "dealer fees," "holdback," "financial reserve," and "advertising fees." Good luck trying to figure out what these fees ought to be for the vehicle you want to buy. Source: http://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/what-fees-should-you-pay.h...
so people who have submitted copies will still get certificates?

that's kinda amusing. [edit: thanks for the reply (have an upvote); missed that. that's more reassuring.]
You are right, we are like Disqus for FAQs. We should make it clearer in the home and feature page. Thanks for the feedback!
Not sure how that's relevant to this DNS issue?
Why is this service free?
Because I like to develop software and this is my contribution to the opensource community. There are plans to provide a paid service to provide revenue that will keep the service sustainable. As it stands, there are multiple tebibytes of storage available, so tarbackup should be available for free well into the future.

I think a pertinent question to answer would be "How is this service free"?
Just an echo of the NYTimes non-story.

Bizarrely, this one self repudiates its own title near the end where they contacted a person that knows what they are doing…

Over at Mozilla, Datacenter Operations Manager Derek Moore says he probably averages around 6 to 10 percent CPU utilization from his server processors, but he doesn’t see that as a problem because he cares about memory and networking.

…

After we contacted him, Moore took a look at the utilization rates of about 1,000 Mozilla servers. Here’s what he found: the average CPU utilization rate was 6 percent; memory utilization was 80 percent; network I/O utilization was 42 percent.

CPU use is irrelevant to most internet servers.

Over the week, I operate my car engine at about 1.2% capacity. Maybe they should write about that.
The New Crapware: Apple’s Desire to Force Its Apps on Customers
I have to wonder if those posting solutions on github are actually doing it in an effort to cheat. I made a similar mistake recently with a project I completed in my computer architecture course. When the professor contacted me about it, it seemed obvious. But at the time, all I was thinking about was "yay, public code!" Obviously, I took it down right away. I wonder how many people are doing the same thing. Cheating a Coursera course just doesn't make much sense.
I've read one of the changes in the new engines will be their using their own turbopumps. It's easy to imagine how their previously sourced ones wouldn't allow an internal layout that was optimal for the external layout of the engines.
Not to take anything away from Felix, but that jump with 50 year old technology seems even more impressive.
tesla did some great work here. i can't follow the argument that automakers selling cars kills competition. the analogy to apple stores is a perfect example: there are still thousands of resellers offering apple products!
Target orbit was 192x203 miles, actual orbit was 122 x 202 miles. These are very different numbers.
Is there any estimate as to when this (mostly) awesome stuff will actually be implemented in browsers?
You have to expect that they kinds of programmers this course would attract will want stick the code they've put hours outside of work into in some kind of source repository.

With the ubiquity of free (public only) github accounts, I'm not entirely sure what else they expected might happen.
I also gave link to the original article. PhysOrg also gives link to the original article and cites a few other sources. I thought in this particular cases it was fine as an overview article.
I really enjoyed reading this article. It was almost as if I was reading about myself!! Naturally I am very introverted. I also love sitting back and studying social interactions that are happening around me.

I have a lot of friends who see me as an unemotional robot. For example, a good friend from high school died in a motorcycle accident a few months ago. I was very calm showing very little worry or stress about it when I found out. My friends who were there were kind of shocked by how calm and worry free I was about it. To me, logically there was nothing I could do to bring him back so why worry about it? At the funeral there was some crying and mourning for him but that was it.

But even though I don't show a lot of emotions I do have a way to look into people's eyes as we have a conversation and I am able to meet them emotionally. I start to create rapport by talking at the level and speed as them. Make sure they feel listened when they talk by giving back feedback. It really works very nicely.

I'm a programmer with not much care to show emotions but meeting people emotionally is one of the most powerful things you can do in your social life.
Curiosity Rover spots shiny object on Mars surface -photos
Why interacting with woman leave man cognitively impaired?
This is a joke. The "top" hosts all list "unlimited" disk space and transfer. This is proven to not be sustainable and simply results in an oversold service that crashes when someone tries to actually use their "unlimited" resources.
So if "anything that gets you to the executed contract is part of the sale", shouldn't all those independent car dealerships be paying the car manufacturers for those expensive and slick TV, magazine and internet advertisements they produce to get people to go to said dealerships to buy their cars?

(Or do they already?)..
"After we contacted him, Moore took a look at the utilization rates of about 1,000 Mozilla servers. Here’s what he found: the average CPU utilization rate was 6 percent; memory utilization was 80 percent; network I/O utilization was 42 percent."

Sounds like they are stuffing as much data as possible into RAM for performance reasons, which causes the servers to be memory-bound, and as such they have more CPU available than they need relative to the amount of RAM.

I am (and I think a lot of other people are) in the same situation.
When discussing online courses, a recurring theme is that of the "value" of online certifications, versus "real life" certifications. By taking action against cheaters, Coursera is trying to preserve the value of their certification. I wonder how it will affect it.

Do people really care about online certifications anyway?

For me, the main advantage of the weekly assignments, is that it stops me from procrastinating, like I might if I were to learn by myself with a book... I don't really care about the certification itself. I guess I can add it to my resume, like the SCJP, but I don't think employers will care much.
The guy bought the seed from the grain elevator... what does that have to do with seed saving? I can see banning the former but people should be able to reuse their seed.

(BTW, I worked like 6 summers for Monsanto detasseling corn)
Learning to Take Insanely Great Pictures
Conflating utilization with efficiency is a mistake that is made so often and so reliably that it probably alone explains why reporting on this is sparse.

To understand if a system is inefficient, I would have to know if the same computing could be performed at a lower total cost of ownership. The utilization of the actual specific resources is an input, but only to understand the computing demand. The reason it is so common to "throw servers at it" is because the hardware and even the power is very cheap compared to human labor costs; and there are significant labor efficiencies in deploying infrastructure in batches.
The certificates, IMHO, are meaningless in the context of these online courses. Considering this, I find the measure exaggerated.

I use github as a central place to store almost everything I write outside work, so it comes pretty natural for me to version code for problems I've been working on there.

Disclaimer: I'm not involved in the Scala course, so I don't know how the actual assigments were structured.
I'm not that well informed here, but my guess is it was a combination of both. They mention

> the extra burn time [of the first stage] left the rocket with insufficient propellant to safely place the Orbcomm satellite into a higher orbit.

I take that to mean that at the time when the first stage ran out of fuel, they were still within the "no-space-junk" threshold where they weren't allowed to separate/jettison the first stage (if that's how it works).

If the first stage had gone smoothly and left them with enough propellant, they would have used that propellant to climb out of ISS danger zone, and then fire the second stage safely.
Services hold key to cloud computing success
I'm confused. Is this article saying that in the US it's illegal for a maker of the product to sell the product to whomever he wants?

How is that helping anyone but the dealerships?
Show HN: Kwicks 2.0.0 - Sexy Sliding Panels for jQuery
I would love an invite if anyone could spare one. My email address is hotspam{at}gmail.com. I've been on the sign up list for over a year but haven't heard a thing. Thanks in advance!
Remembering the relation of a bipartite graph to graph coloring helped me coming up with an algorithm fairly quickly. Although that might in fact require a little familiarity with graphs and the associated terms. I guess most of my former fellow students who didn't hear a graph theory lecture won't really remember that.
It's a HDD which is supposed to use less electricity because it has a lower or variable spin speed. It's probably mostly a marketing gimmick.
So my running list of things that are obviously outdated and fruitlessly resisting their death throes now includes:

- Auto dealerships
- Music labels
- Government secrecy
> What I find most fascinating about this is that our conscious minds are not very good at thinking about exponential growth.

I thought about it too, and come up with idea that some equivalent of Weber-Fechner law [1] might be working at it this level. So I have made a small write-up about this idea that you might find interesting [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law
[2] http://xion.org.pl/2012/04/11/self-reinforcement-and-exponen...
With that argument, Apple should've felt bad for Mac vs PC ads and Pepsi should've felt bad for their Pepsi Challenge campaign against Coke. It's what challenger brands do.
Doesn't seem so:

"For those students for whom it's been discovered have uploaded similar or duplicate solutions, cases will be handled on an individual basis. Though beware, that cheating in any capacity not be tolerated."
Please Google dont F with - white Seo
Does it also disable using any kind of keyboard event? Because if so, that cuts out a ton of legitimate use cases for full screen. If not, it just makes the vulnerability slightly more of a pain to exploit.
Just for the record, since this topic is getting old as these things go, the upper stage insertion burn didn't happen because the longer burns of the first two stages wouldn't allow it without it getting to close to the Space Station, which has very wide margins for safety (i.e. as far as they know the burn could have happened, they didn't try). Sounds like a bet on a cheaper flight that didn't pay off for Orbcomm, although it remains to be seen if they can get any use out of the satellite.
An Introduction to HTML URL Encoding
here in English:

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/08/14300136-mars-...
Sorry, I screwed up. I skimmed the question and mis-remebered it when making my post. I thought the question looked like:

for(i=0...
for(j=0...
A[i][j]=0;

vs

for(i=0...
for(j=0...
A[j][i]=0;

In which case C vs Fortran makes a difference to the way multidimensional arrays are stored in memory.
Remind me again which devices decode webm in hardware?
That's why Firefox no longer has the favicon in the URL bar.
"Sure, they might succeed in banning them in a state or two..."

More likely they will be forced to create a franchise dealership network.
I'm entirely self taught at Scala and never did Java, so I'm doing it just to test myself to see how much I missed and how much I understand already. Certification is almost entirely worthless as a CV aid... it gives an indicator that you are willing to put in effort out of hours for self improvement, but it's value vs a well tended github account / a programming test is negligible.
At the end of the day, these things are tools really. Focus on your customers, product, feature-set, etc. If you find that implementing feature x is going to be really difficult/impossible in PHP, look at other tools that measure up to the job. Else, stick to PHP. That is what you know and that is what you will be most productive in.
I abhor when people use "veep". It just looks childish and makes no sense....
"Oh no! It's a new business model that is different than our old business model! We must use legal means to stop it immediately because we don't know yet if we can compete with it!"

Plus, customers may like it better since the current method is usually despised...
Thats a good thing. Rust is THE alternative to C++, and it should not lose focus by compiling to javascript.... Rust should not compile to javascript.. It should remain native(LLVM).

@pcwalton Please assure me that rust won't compile to javascript, and it will remain Native (C/C++ compatible, ahead-of-time). Rust is my last haven, let it remain rust only!!
Indeed. A persistent cartel is a sign that such industry has unethical legal protection, to the detriment of the consumer.
If it's your work, you own the copyright, and it's totally within your rights to make it publicly available.
Well the answer is obvious. Just make light go faster.
Show HN: Silly weekend project sends physical postcards using Sincerely & Stripe
I really like explanations in the form: "we're <known service> for <new problem to solve>"
Many users of pinterest that I have talked to have said they find the interface confusing. Specifically the content layout. The very feature these other sites are now ripping for their own.
Awesome man, I would like to integrate it on my Website and my iOS/Android app. Hope you guys open the API soon. <3
It's to be expected there will be cheating. Even in normal brick and mortar school s there were always cheaters. Hell, even the tour de france got turned into a dopers ball. So yes, this is a bummer and all the naysayers of these free opensource online classes now just have more ammo. But as someone who's life has not allowed them the path to Stanford/Upenn/University of Toronto, etc, I am putting in the work and bothering to actually learn and extremely grateful for the opportunity. So bummer, sure, but shame on the cheaters.
You are neglecting one issue: advertising and lawsuits. "Oh look, we have smuggled our product into the tightest-controlled advertising event, and we did it on purpose; sure, we'll happily pay you the $$$ for this priceless publicity boost." vs "Oh, it was an accident, there's no way we'll pay you anything."

I'm completely certain that the F1 organizers would sue the heck out of Red Bull for their unauthorized ad, if they only could prove RB did it on purpose (and RB isn't so foolish to provide them with ammunition).
yahoo.ie was hijacked too. Both are back to normal now, the incident duration was about 1h.
Only 3? I figured Radioshack/Bestbuy belong in this category in the long run.

Would be interesting discussion on what industries denizens of HN think will fall in this manner.
NewSQL — The New Way to Handle Big Data
> How is that helping anyone but the dealerships?

It's not.
HOW WILL THIS MAKE MONEY
So clients will have to download this to their machines (via CDN?)
Monsanto wants to argue that seeds are patentable because they are unique and involve human intelligence endeavour which should be protected. They also argue that GMO foods do not need to be labeled as such for the consumer because they are not significantly different from 'regular' foods. Any contradictions?
OrientDB - The NoSQL Graph-Document DBMS
It's a trade-off, really. As mentioned in the blog post, we had considerably more complex actions, and many more types of post-action task than were shown.

You're quite right, in the original code it's easier to see at a glance what happens in that particular action. However, over the span of the whole application it's much more difficult to see, say, all circumstances in which an activity update is triggered, or all the ways a user might get a gamification reward for doing something on the site. It was precisely the growing complexity of our app that motivated this change; we were losing the ability to keep control of (and test) whole important features of our site, such as mailout logic, gamification, etc. and so forth.

As I say at the end, I certainly don't recommend this as a catch-all approach; you've got to know your app and be aware of the advantages and disadvantages.
That could be a lot of liability they're holding, since they voided the warranties on the externals by shucking them. So they could wind up paying twice for failed HDDs = $130 + $130 + $25 in gas and wage to pay someone to drive around to pick these up = $285 or so per HDD?

Plus 2 people got banned from Costco.
what happened to the post that raised ethical questions about this? i think it had a valid point.

the hard drive shortage hit us all. this one company coordinated a mass buying operation from commercial stores when the rest of use were looking for personal use.

while i don't think this is illegal, it doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy inside either.

when there's a shortage, the "noise" in traditional distribution means that small buyers (like me, and many others) can still find what we need if we put in some extra effort. it functions like a "soft buffer", making the transition to a complete lack of resources more gradual. action like this removes that buffer.

this feels like one group of people - driven by their desire to do business - beat out a load of other people who didn't have the same logistical resources. there's something uncool about it. i am not sure i have explained very well, but it's to do with crossing the line from business to personal.

[edit: ah, thanks - separate thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4630910]

[edit2: wtf? i thought someone replied here? was about to upvote you. thanks anyway.]